People ask me what the most important thing to take on the race is, and I always say it's a sense of humor. If you've got nothing but a sense of humor, you will survive.
We've seen computers play chess and beat grand masters. We've seen computers drive a car across a desert. But interestingly, playing chess is easy, but having a conversation about nothing is really difficult for a computer.
If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for ...
By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in...
Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.
People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs, and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.
Nest really came out of a process where I was trying to design the most connected and the most green home that I knew of. I was curious of just about everything that goes into a home and building a home.
One of the great things about moving to Silicon Valley is that you're surrounded by all these people who've done it before. This place is an assembly line that takes a couple of twenty-somethings and walks you through everything you need to learn.
I used to love to see Willie Pep and Ray Robinson. To me, the epitome of a great athlete is a great boxer. I just love the rhythm of seeing a man dance, slip punches. I loved the dancers and boxers. I would see them and be mesmerized.
You know what, Steve Jobs is real nice to me. He lets me be an employee and that's one of the biggest honors of my life.
If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
I use Google+, and I find the quality of the comments are very sophisticated because there is more trust inside of Google+ than there is inside of Twitter and Facebook, for example.
You know, watching Dan Marino and Steve Young get nominated to the Hall of Fame... those guys are unbelievable and they did it for so long. I'd love to play like those guys, but there's still a long way to go and a lot of growing.
A lot of people thought Steve Jobs was a CEO of Apple but he never was until he came back to Apple in 1997.
Part of Steve's job was to drum into us how important what we were doing actually would be to the world.
I like people that challenge their art, not only in the purist way, but also in terms of how they could provoke and make something different.
Memories fade but words hang around forever.
And now the story begins for the last time.
Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.
And when Elvis was unhappy, believe me, everyone was unhappy.
The energy we put out is the energy we get back.
